Discourse Plugin Guard

Guards your Discourse against plugin issues.

Note that this plugin manually overrides files in the Discourse installation itself, before any other plugin is loaded. This is to ensure all plugin errors are caught and handled by this plugin without affecting the normal operation of Discourse. As long as you follow the steps outlined below when developing and deploying the plugin everything will work as expected.

Installation

[Plugin is not yet ready for deployment on client servers]

Development

Setup the following environment variables

PLUGIN_GUARD_ROOT: the root of paviliondev/discourse-plugin-guard
DISCOURSE_ROOT: the root of discourse/discourse

Use a development workflow that looks like this

1. Run bin/setup.sh to create the necessary folders and symlink the necessary files.

2. Perform development as normal.

3. When you've finished:

   • If you've added or removed files or folders in lib make sure bin/setup.sh and templates/plugin_guard.template.yml are updated accordingly.

   • Clean your discourse/discourse working tree.

Deployment on Canary Servers

As well as being deployed on client servers, this plugin is deployed on the following "canary" servers:

• tests-passed.discourse.pluginmanager.org
• stable.discourse.pluginmanager.org

If you need to deploy updates to the plugin guard ssh into the relevant server and run discourse_update (see bin/update.sh).

Scheduled Rebuilds

The canary servers running this plugin use crontab to automatically rebuild and cleanup their docker containers on set schedules.

The cron jobs on both servers are

0 00 * * * /usr/local/bin/discourse_rebuild >>/tmp/cron_debug_log.log 2>&1
0 00 * * 1,3,5 /usr/local/bin/discourse_cleanup >>/tmp/cron_debug_log.log 2>&1

The templates for discourse_rebuild and discourse_cleanup are bin/rebuild.sh and bin/cleanup.sh.

External Monitoring

The cron jobs on the canary servers are monitored on cronitor.io. The CronitorCLI is installed on the servers, tracking the cron jobs mentioned above. If a job does not start, or it fails to complete, then an alert is sent to the Plugin Guardian category on the Plugin Manager server and assigned to a Plugin Guardian.